As soon as they heard the bottle shatter on the wall behind them, three men—two Mounties and Trudeau’s campaign aide Pierre Levasseur—leapt forward to shield the prime minister where he sat. They urged him to leave the stand as the others had done. Trudeau bent forward to pick up his coat, presumably with the intention of going. Then, in one of the most dramatic moments in Canadian political history, he threw his coat defiantly to the ground. Waving off his bodyguards, Trudeau alone took his seat—fully exposed to the projectiles of the demonstrators. Raw anger animated his normally inscrutable face. Moments later, just to accentuate his defiance, he sat forward, with his arms hanging over the rail of the platform, plainly visible to the crowd. A second bottle smashed into the wall below him. He did not flinch. Plainclothes police officers took seats beside him, one of them apparently trying to shield him from any additional projectiles with a large raincoat. On the sidewalk, officers in the street formed themselves into a barrier two men deep.
The crowd yelled out, “Bravo Trudeau!” In the press box across the street from the library, journalists including Peter C. Newman jumped to their feet to applaud the prime minister’s courage. A pretty young woman on the stalled float blew Trudeau a kiss. The prime minister, now at his ease and smiling, shook hands and chatted warmly with Mayor Drapeau and Archbishop Grégoire. The parade resumed. Less than three minutes had passed since the bottle had crashed into the wall behind the prime minister. The scene was as unscripted as it was electrifying, and all of it was captured live on television.
A new round of clashes between the rioters and uniformed officers began, but after the bottle-throwing incident, security officials were taking no chances. They reinforced the police cordon around the reviewing stand and prevented anyone from passing for the remainder of the night.
At 11:15 p.m., the parade ended, but not the riot. It petered out an hour later. The police continued to drag demonstrators into paddy wagons or escort them to ambulances. Several officers, believed to have had acid or other chemicals thrown in their faces, were themselves taken by ambulance to hospital. Montreal officials would tally the butcher’s bill the next day. Roughly 1,200 police officers had squared off against an almost equal number of protesters. Eighty demonstrators were injured, most of them with fractured skulls, broken limbs, and cuts and bruises. Another 290, including Pierre Bourgault, were in police custody. Forty-three police officers were hurt.
After the parade, Trudeau and most of the other VIPs made their exit through the library and into their waiting cars. Daniel Johnson, Jean Drapeau, and Claude Ryan were among those who stuck around, trying to make sense of the events they had just witnessed. What they saw before them as they made their way out onto Sherbrooke was the smouldering detritus of the riot scene—fires burning, scorched patches of park lawn, smashed park benches and signs, broken glass strewn everywhere. The air stank of gasoline, burning rubber, and firecrackers. On the still-floodlit street, cameras captured a visibly frustrated police officer smashing his fist into the face of a young demonstrator. At that point, the lights were switched off, and so were the cameras. “Trudeau should not have come,” said Claude Ryan gravely. “If he had any sense of timing, he would have stayed away. I can just see the papers in English Canada tomorrow. I have never seen anything like this before. Not here.”24
Around midnight, Trudeau reunited with the other dignitaries at a reception hosted by the Société Saint-Jean-Baptiste. There he ran into Premier Johnson and Marcel Faribault, the high-profile federal Tory candidate from Quebec. Trudeau wished Faribault good luck in the election the next day. Faribault took the opportunity to reprimand the prime minister. “I don’t agree with you,” he lectured Trudeau. “I didn’t go up on the parade reviewing stand because I didn’t want that to be interpreted as a provocation to anyone.”25 Trudeau smiled. “This is not the first time we disagree,” he said, “and it probably won’t be the last.”26
As the dust settled on Parc La Fontaine the next day, dismayed Canadians and Quebecers alike took stock. “Scenes of St. Jean Baptiste Day violence in Montreal might have shocked Canadians more had they not been conditioned by films of terrorism in the streets of New York, Paris and Belgrade,” observed a Globe and Mail editorial. “It was chilling to hear the chants of ‘Trudeau to the gallows.’ And it was awful to know that there were, in that crowd, men who had threatened the Prime Minister’s life.”27 Trudeau was fortunate, everyone agreed, that the rioters’ weapons of choice had been bottles and not bullets. Montreal police chief Jean-Paul Gilbert told reporters that the mob had been well trained and well organized. “We are launching a full investigation to find out who trained them,” he said. “Our investigation will bring those responsible in the open.” Charges of police brutality were raised. Gilbert asserted that police had shown complete restraint until the violence had begun and the utmost professionalism after that. “If anyone has to complain about police brutality,” he said, “let him write to me personally and his complaint will be investigated.”28
The big story in the headlines the next day was Trudeau himself, the prime minister who had stood up to the worst civil unrest in Quebec since the conscription riots of World War II. “Trudeau Defies Separatists” and “Trudeau tient tête aux manifestants” (“Trudeau stands up to protesters”), declared the headlines.29
Already, the man himself was downplaying the incident, joking with the press that it was election day in Canada and he had more important things to think about. A journalist asked him why he had refused to take shelter from the mob. “I was curious,” he replied. “I wanted to see what was happening.”30 Speaking on Montreal talk radio later that day, Trudeau was philosophical. “It is most regrettable that the people of Quebec can’t have their St. Jean Baptiste Day in peace,” he said. “I think the population will reject this resort to violence. The people who use it will be pushed out of society as time goes by.”31
As Canadians headed to the polls, they, too, were philosophical. “It was the most remarkable ending to an election campaign in Canadian political history,” the Canadian Annual Review observed. “The price was a savage one, but nothing would have better dramatized the issue of Canadian unity.”32
Dalton Camp, the Tories’ top campaign strategist and no stranger to controversy, had the last word. He believed that Trudeau was probably unbeatable the moment he won the Liberal nomination, but his performance in Montreal clinched it. “When you are lucky in politics,” quipped Camp, “even your enemies oblige you.”
The Globe and Mail editorial noted above was dead right. The Saint-Jean-Baptiste riot was indeed symptomatic of Canada’s existential crisis in 1968. It was also part of a pattern of social upheaval that swept the North Atlantic world that year, one that has since given the era of the sixties some of its most potent myths. Today, almost fifty years later, the generation of student radicals and others who gave youthful voice to “the spirit of ‘68” are growing older. As they well know, the twenty-first-century world bears little resemblance to the countercultural utopia of “personal and collective liberation” they once dreamt of.33 Nostalgia for sixties radicalism is today in its death throes. It barely survived the collapse of Soviet-style collectivism. It will not survive the threat of global terror. The city of Paris, venerated by radicals everywhere in May 1968 for its crippling strikes and massive student protests, is today terrorized by a far more vicious generation of young revolutionaries. Ordinary citizens everywhere react with unsentimental resolve. Aging sixties radicals are writing their last apologia.
To date, Pierre Trudeau’s rise to power has been viewed almost entirely through the prism of this sixties nostalgia trip. In the spring of 1968, we are told, Canadians were still blissed out from Expo 67 and hungry for a charismatic, youthful leader in the mould of John F. Kennedy. Intelligent, irreverent, flirtatious, telegenic, a millionaire playboy in a two-seater Mercedes, Pierre Elliott Trudeau merely had to step into the breach.
Little wonder that Trudeau was, and remains, an enigma to so
many of his critics. Canadian conservatives disparage Trudeau circa 1968 as the worst sort of socialist—the kind who imposed his collectivist fantasies on his own people by stealth.34 Canadian left-nationalists dismiss Trudeau as a laissez-faire liberal who did nothing to counter the rapacious American takeover of Canada.35 Quebec nationalists hold Trudeau almost single-handedly responsible for la fin d’un rêve canadien (the end of a Canadian dream).36 It is not unusual to read, in even the most erudite Trudeau scholarship, the aspersion that Pierre Trudeau felt no genuine sense of belonging to either Quebec or Canada, and was thus all the more dangerous for having been a perennial “outsider.”37 Even Richard Gwyn, who in 1981 lionized Trudeau as a Canadian star in a world of mediocrities, claimed in 1997 that he “teases, taunts, inspires, and bugs the hell out of Canadians because they know he is utterly un-Canadian.”38 Gwyn meant this as a compliment.
Admittedly, it requires a huge suspension of disbelief to revisit Trudeaumania in 1968 without reference to everything that came later. But the project is timely, and the reward great. Why? Because to the extent that we now live in (and indeed contest) the Canada that Pierre built, Trudeaumania has become a Canadian creation myth in its own right. There is a good reason why Trudeau’s political enemies continue to write breathless exposés of his nefarious deeds as if the man himself were still alive, and it has nothing to do with Justin. It is because they detest living in Trudeau’s Canada.
This book challenges at least three common myths about Trudeaumania.
The first is that Trudeau captivated the imaginations of Canadians as the direct result of nationalist exuberance born of the 1967 centennial. “Canadians wanted more of that good old Centennial-Expo feeling,” wrote journalist Larry Zolf in 1973. “They were ready for Oneness—One Canada, Justice, the Just Society and Love, Love, Love.”39 Nineteen sixty-seven was Canada’s last good year, observed Pierre Berton, twenty years after the fact. “Canadians wanted the same excitement in their politics that they enjoyed in their hockey. Behind that fervour was the yearlong love affair with the country engendered by thousands of centennial projects and the giddy triumph of Expo. What was wanted was a kind of political version of [“Ca-na-da” composer] Bobby Gimby. And there, quietly waiting in the wings in his ascot scarf and sandals, was the man most likely to succeed to the throne.”40 Professional historians have since added their voices. Trudeau’s “pent-up power exploded in the spring and summer of 1968,” writes labour historian Bryan Palmer. “The fireworks were dubbed Trudeaumania. It was the pyrotechnics of a Canadian identity struggling to be born, shooting wildly out of the euphoria that had, for some, begun with the architectural imagination of Expo 67.”41
In fact, the proposition that Trudeaumania flowed directly from the 1967 centennial and was the product of nationalist euphoria is counter-historical. It makes an easy (and, of course, appealing) connection where there is very little connective tissue. Take the case of Peter C. Newman, who, as this book will show, rightly took credit for discovering Trudeau.42 When he was watching the Trudeaumania phenomenon unfold in 1968, Newman knew that there was nothing foreordained about it. “Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s conquest of the Liberal Party appeared in retrospect like a royal procession predestined to glory,” Newman wrote in The Distemper of Our Times that year. “But in the bleak chill of December [1967] just after Lester Pearson’s resignation, Trudeau’s victory seemed far from inevitable; in fact, it was scarcely credible.”43 Yet one year later, when Distemper was reprinted in the United States as A Nation Divided: Canada and the Coming of Pierre Trudeau, Newman added a preface that directly contradicted his own real-time observations. “For Americans,” Newman now wrote, “Expo was a revelation; for Canadians it was even more; it changed our view of ourselves. It gave us a fresh appreciation of our own capabilities. It inspired new self-confidence and out of this transformed environment came a new man—Pierre Elliott Trudeau.”44
For most Canadians, there was far more of the bleak chill to the winter of 1968 than there was of self-confidence. Lester Pearson would recall in retirement that Canada’s centennial celebrations had offered a much-needed respite “because our country was going through a difficult time, especially in Quebec.”45 When British Columbia premier W.A.C. Bennett came out squarely against Trudeau in March 1968, he said Trudeau was not the right leader for Canada “in these times of emergency.”46 McGill University political scientist Michael Oliver noted in 1964 that Canada was “entering into a period of great stress.” The “criminal lunacy” of the FLQ was merely the most visible symptom of a seismic shift in French Canadians’ views of Confederation, warned Oliver. “If Canada is to survive in a recognizable form—and this is not putting the point too strongly—changes are indicated.”47 McGill dean of law Maxwell Cohen agreed. “It is clear that Canada is possibly facing the gravest threat to federal unity since Confederation,” Cohen observed in October 1967. “The Centennial celebrations have shifted, ironically, from arts and games to survival.”48
By the winter of 1968, the public mood in Canada was one of quiet desperation. Just weeks before election day, June 25, 1968, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bobby Kennedy were murdered by gun-toting loners. President Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not seek re-election as the Vietnam War escalated and the Paris peace process stalled. So-called race riots consumed U.S. cities, giving every impression that American civil society was imploding. In Quebec, Pierre Bourgault, René Lévesque, and other separatists were not just dreaming of sundering Canada but planning for it. What was worse, the English-Canadian political establishment, personified by John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson, appeared to have no clue how to respond. That the FLQ, Canada’s own homegrown terrorist outfit, was bombing its way towards a Marxist utopia merely gave the crisis its visceral urgency. Pierre Trudeau did not appeal to Canadians because they were intoxicated with the “new nationalism” of the 1960s. He appealed to them because the public mood was one of deep disquiet, and he alone brought both toughness and clear-eyed solutions to the worst national-unity crisis in memory.
The second myth is that Pierre Trudeau rose to national prominence as the result of superficial media processes and particularly through his adroit handling of the new medium of television. “Trudeau was quick, cool, detached, articulate, shrewd, a man whose drifting past seemed romantic, whose lack of involvement suited a nation sick to death of the screams and whines of its politicians,” wrote Walter Stewart in his 1971 book Shrug. “Above all, he looked superb; whatever quality it is that makes TV work for one man and not another, Trudeau had it.”49 In their award-winning 1990 book Trudeau and Our Times, Christina McCall and Stephen Clarkson took this idea even further, claiming that Trudeau used television to deceive Canadians. Citing Marshall McLuhan’s famous remark that Trudeau’s face was a “perfect mask” for the TV age, Clarkson and McCall asserted that “McLuhan was shrewder than anyone knew. The real Trudeau was being falsified. What the public saw was indeed a mask, a heroic image it wanted to believe in that sat uneasily on a man whose complexities were unknown to his euphoric admirers” (italics added).50 The enduring implication of this assertion is that Trudeau was complicit in the fabrication of his own media persona. He was the political equivalent of the Monkees.
Pierre Trudeau despised television. “I can hardly stand it,” he remarked during the Liberal leadership campaign.51 He opposed Lester Pearson’s introduction of TV cameras into the House of Commons in 1965 and thereafter appeared to have no sense of its utility to his own political ambitions. Trudeau performed so poorly during the televised leaders’ debate in June 1968 that network executives wondered whether they would ever broadcast another one. Many of his contemporaries thought Trudeau ill-suited for modern televisual politics because he was far from telegenic in the Kennedy style. “Visually, Trudeau is a poor parliamentarian,” observed the Toronto Star’s Frank Jones. “His medium stature, casual stance and rather high-pitched voice make only a small impression.”52 Larry Zolf later recalled that Trudeau did not s
trike anyone as particularly sexy in 1964. “His pock-marked face gave him a tough street-kid look, accentuated by his cold blue eyes,” wrote Zolf. “If anything, he seemed asexual.”53 Trudeau’s cabinet colleague John Turner—a fluently bilingual Rhodes Scholar—was far more handsome and telegenic. Yet television did nothing for him in 1968.54
As this book will show, Pierre Trudeau was not a creature of the screen but of the text. Whatever effect his telegenic mask may have had on TV-watching teenyboppers—most of whom were too young to vote—it was the power of his ideas that impressed the 45.4 per cent of Canadians who voted for him in 1968. Equally important, it was the content of those ideas that turned off the majority of Canadians who did not vote for him. Decades of intense study, debate, and writing—in Cité libre and elsewhere—put Trudeau’s oeuvre within reach of reading Canadians, in both French and English. It is commonly said that few people outside Canada’s political elite actually read Trudeau. But the historical record suggests otherwise. Trudeau’s ideas were circulated widely among Canadians via a pervasive print culture of books, newspapers, and journals, one that assumed ordinary citizens could grasp complicated political concepts and had the inclination to do so. All the major players in the national-unity debate wrote “popular” books in the mid-1960s. They included Daniel Johnson’s Égalité ou indépendance (1965), Marcel Faribault’s Vers une nouvelle constitution (1967), René Lévesque’s Option Québec (1968), and Trudeau’s own Federalism and the French Canadians (1967). All were national bestsellers, Trudeau’s lingering in the top five throughout the spring campaign. Television helped Trudeau, but mostly in the sense that it helped to spread his ideas. In 1968, the message was still the message.
The third myth is related to the second, and it is the most damning. Pierre Trudeau, it is said, was an imposter who lied to Canadians to serve his own ambitions. “Both his Frenchness and his intellectualism were acceptable,” wrote Christina McCall-Newman in her 1982 book Grits, “mostly because they came wrapped in a number of other attributes—physical prowess, a powerful sexuality which he enhanced with his calculated flirtatiousness, a talent for romanticizing his past, and a genius for sounding as though he knew how to solve Canada’s bi-racial problems. All these things masked his real nature” (italics added).55 According to McCall-Newman, Trudeau planned his ascent in federal politics brilliantly, from 1965 to his leadership victory, by claiming that he did not want it. “Trudeau won the leadership and the country by cunning and charisma,” she concluded.56
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